Estimating dimension of inertial manifold from unstable periodic orbits

We provide numerical evidence that a finite-dimensional inertial manifold on which the dynamics of a chaotic dissipative dynamical system lives can be constructed solely from the knowledge of a set of unstable periodic orbits. In particular, we determine the dimension of the inertial manifold for Kuramoto-Sivashinsky system, and find it to be equal to the `physical dimension’ computed previously via the hyperbolicity properties of covariant Lyapunov vectors.